Abstract
There are two truisms which can be stated about the black community in America. The first is that the Church is the most important institution within the black community, as has been noted by W.E.B. DuBois in his classic, The Souls of Black Folk (1903).1 The second is that the Holy Bible is the foundation stone upon which that Church and its preaching is firmly established. Howard Thurman has already demonstrated this in his studies on spirituals, The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death (1947), and Deep River (1955).2 James Cone reaffirms the same in his A Black Theology of Liberation (1970), and Spirituals
and the Blues (1972).3 The emerging discipline of Black Theology, discourse about God from the perspective of black folk, also recognizes the centrality of Church and Bible.